I may have discovered a perpetual power generator last day (night) :)
My AC300+B300 was reporting 3% power around 17:00. It is in a remote location and I monitor it online. Night approaching I thought, well, it will go out of power and had to manually go there and restart its output ports next morning (the major beef I have with this, btw!). I am having the AC output on (since I have the WIFI router on that) while DC is off.
I programmed the router to go off and restart in the morning, so it draw less power. But again remember that AC output from station was always on, drawing, what I would expect, at least 30w / hour.
So I had no hope and I was expecting the router to not start again this morning, but to my surprise it restarted, and the power station (its battery) has the same 3% capacity left! I repeated the process for past 2 hours of the morning (which had yet no sun) and the battery is still stuck at 3%.
I am not complaining, but what’s up with this? Is this some low consumption (low temp, talking about 0-5 celsius) calibration thing with the battery? I don’t believe AC300 has some low consumption (when no consumers are present) mode for AC output on.
Hi @licu, Thank you for sharing, that truly is an incredible experience.
Your analysis is correct. When the AC output is turned on, self-consumption occurs even without a load.
We speculate that before sunrise, the solar panels may have converted some visible light and initiated solar charging, which could explain why the battery level remained stable. Do you agree with this theory?
We hope this AC200MAX + B300 combo continues to perform well and provides you with a steady supply of solar power.
No, there was no solar input involved at that time. Since: I checked the battery state at 17:00 (winter time, completely dark outside). It was 3%. Then at 21:00, again 3%. Then at 0:0, again 3%. Then very early in the morning and again 3%. Very very strange.
Now that another day passed, here some update: it started to get solar input, nothing fancy (since it is very dark), like around 100w, for about 5 hours. It barely went to 4%, with no consumption but AC on. Which doesn’t add up, even with 60w consumption from idle inverter, it should have gone up to 10% or so (what i saw in the past for similar conditions).
Then, night came, it went from 4% to 3% very quickly (30mins?) and stayed there, at 3%, for 4-5 hours before finally shutting down.
I believe is a combination of low temperature and how station is figuring out the battery charge.
BTW: i need to stress this out again: we really need a way to have an option to start with ports as before the shutdown. It is not normal for me to go hundreds of km to just press a button for the station to puts it AC/DC outputs on, after a complete shutdown. I think it was a terrible design decision to not have this option (at user risk, if safety is a concern).
Hi @licu, Thank you for getting back to us so quickly.
Your analysis is insightful—it seems that the low temperature significantly slowed down the unit’s self-consumption. However, this situation is indeed quite rare.
We also truly understand the concerns of our users.
We have indeed received similar feedback recently—manually turning on the AC output when far from home can be quite inconvenient.
However, implementing this on older models is quite challenging due to hardware limitations.
We are continuously working to incorporate more customizable features into new models based on customer feedback.
If you are considering upgrading a new device, we recommend the Elite 200 V2 or other new models, which offer significant advantages in friendly operation performance.
@licu as an alternative, can you add a device to the front of the unit, that you can log into, to physically make it move and press the AC button?
For example, a network controlled hobby servo motor that has its own small battery that’s charged by the main unit so that it stays active even when AC300 power shuts off. This servo could be double-sided-foam-taped to the front, with (as one example) one of its circular servo horns being cut in a spiral so that it has a high pressing force as it rotates back and forth to actuate a button.
Just a thought as a workaround, although it would take a bit of work from your end.
Hi, thank you for the suggestion, but activating the ports is via touch screen on this unit. There is no AC button. Plus, many times, the station resumes with some error code (like “ran out of power etc”) that need to be cleared first (by going into several sub-menus) before doing any operations. You cannot even restart the station (the only thing you can do via a single physical button it has) if it has any power input (e.g. from grid, from solar), which means first you need to do a complex unplugging of the input cable (unscrew power safety ring and then unplug it, all on a very non-standard cable). So not really designed to be an autonomous power source for something.